Untitled - witz cultural

The EfFects of Hypermedia inTeaching and LearningOne ethnographical team devoted three years to studying theeffects of hypermedia in teaching.a The first effect comesfrom the experience ofPeter Heywood, associate professor ofbiology, who used an Intermedia component in his upperclasscourse in plant-cell biology. The term paper for his course, which he intendedto be a means of introducing students to both the literature of the fieldand the way it is written, required that students include all materials on theirparticular topic that had seen publication up to the week before papers werehanded in. This demanding assignment required that Heywood devote agreat deal of time to assisting individual students with their papers and theirbibliographies, and one of the chief attractions of the Intermedia componentto him lay in its potential to make such information more accessible. Usinghypermedia greatly surprised Heywood by producing a completely unexpectedeffect. In the previous seventeen years that he had taught this course,he had discovered that many term papers came in after the deadline, somelong after, and that virhrally all papers concerned topics covered in the firstthree weeks of the course. The first year that students used the Intermediacomponent, al1 thirty-four papers came in on time. Moreover, their topics wereequally distributed throughout the fourteen weeks of the semester. Heywoodexplains this dramatic improvement in student performance as a result ofthe way hypertext linking permits students to perceive connections amongmaterials covered at different times during the semester. Although all othercomponents of the course remained the same, the capabilities of hypermediapermitted students to follow links to topics covered later in the courseand thereby encounter atrractive problems for independent work. For example,while reading materials about the cell membrane in the first weeks of thecourse, students could follow links that brought them to related materials notcovered until week eight, when the course examined genetics, or until the lastweeks of the course, when it concerned ecological questions or matters ofbioengineering. Many who enrolled in this upper-division course had alreadytaken other advanced courses in genetics, biochemistry, or similarly relatedsubjects. From the very beginning of the semester, linking permitted thesestudents to integrate materials encountered early in this course with thosepreviously encountered in other classes.Educational hypertext in this way serves what McGrath describes as oneof those "technological tools . . . designed in part to ease the constraints of thetime/activity match in relation to communication in groups. For example,certain forms of computer conference arrangements permit so-called asyn-